“God grants liberty only to those who love it, and are always ready to guard and defend it.” ... Daniel Webster ...
These posts will reflect my personal opinions, and views, of the world in which we live from, of course, the viewpoint of a conservative "Southern American".

Saturday, September 08, 2012

No, Don't Fool America Twice ... Alan Caruba

By Alan Caruba
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. It’s a cliché
but a true one. After you have learned someone cannot be trusted,
continuing to trust him is not just naiveté, but delusional. It is also
quite common.

I am a few weeks shy of my 75th birthday and in my lifetime I do not
recall a single speech more filled with demagoguery, division, and
deception than the concoction of lies uttered by President Obama. But he
does deliver a speech extraordinarily well. What we need now, however,
is not more speeches, but solutions.

Consider Obama’s usual snake oil that was on display in his acceptance
speech Thursday evening. It was truly a masterful act of deception. “The
path we offer may be harder, but it leaders to a better place. And I’m
asking you to choose that future.” Four more years of high unemployment?
Four more years of an economy growing so slowly it barely qualifies as a
recovery? A convention during which the national debt hit sixteen
trillion dollars? Is that really “the path” any sensible person would
choose?

His 2012 acceptance speech was full of the last three years of math
trickery and unfulfilled promises. Not mentioned is that the Making Work
Pay tax credit, a payroll tax cut, has been allowed to expire.
Everyone’s taxes will increase next year. The Washington Post awarded him “two pinocchios” for his tax cut claims.

Should it come as any surprise that Obama was nominated by former
President Bill Clinton who told a real whopper? He said that no previous
president had ever been able to overcome the financial mess Obama keeps
telling us he “inherited” when in fact President Ronald Reagan faced a
similar daunting challenge, a recession left behind by Jimmy Carter and,
within three years, began the turnaround of the economy that was
historic compared to the floundering of Franklin D. Roosevelt who
actually prolonged the Great Depression from 1933 to 1945.

It is instructive to go back to Obama’s equally vaporous and vacuous promises during his 2008 acceptance speech because he repeated many of them.

In 2008 he said, “Tonight, more Americans are out of work and more are
working for less.” Well, yes, and he could have said that again last
night because, during the last four years, unemployment has climbed to
historic heights with an estimated 23 million Americans worse off than
they were when he took office. Obama’s “path” has been more than forty
months of unemployment at an office eight percent or more, but for
blacks, Hispanics and the nation’s youth, it is far higher.

Are we better off today than in 2008? The answer is no.

In 2008 Obama cited our ills, but said “These challenges are not all of
government’s making.” Well, yes, they were! The financial crisis that
occurred in 2008 was the oft-predicted failure of Congress’s housing
policies going back to FDR’s era when Fannie Mae and later Freddie Mac
were created with the promise that everyone could own a home, but not
then, nor now was that ever possible except for the
pressures—particularly in recent years—on banks to make bad loans they
knew could not be paid. They then sold them to the two
government-sponsored agencies who, at the time of the collapse, owned
fifty percent of all home mortgages! The federal government was forced
to seize control of both and to pump more money into both.

Obama’s answer, however, was that it was—wait for it—George W. Bush’s
fault; the same President who strove to get Congress to reform Fannie
Mae and Freddie Mac, and to address the changes needed to reform and
save Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

The 2008 acceptance speech was replete with goals—promises made—such as
achieving in ten years an end to our dependence on oil from the Middle
East. That was perhaps the most deceitful promise in the light of the
way his administration arbitrarily shut down drilling in the Gulf a
Mexico after the BP accident and has thwarted all oil exploration and
drilling on federally owned lands and offshore where our nation’s coasts
hold billion of barrels of untapped oil and billions of cubic feet of
natural gas..

Instead, the Obama administration pursued “investments” in the least
productive sources of electricity, solar and wind, squandering billions
as one solar company after another went bankrupt leaving the taxpayers
to pick up the tab. Both solar and wind require backup by traditional
coal-fired, natural gas, hydro-electric, and nuclear power plants to
ensure a steady source of electricity, but the Obama administration has
openly waged a war on coal mining and coal-fired power generation.

To promise that cars will go twice as far on a single gallon of gas is
to defy the laws of physics. There is a finite amount of power in a
gallon of gas and no amount of engineering can increase it. What can and
is decreased is the safety of the car and its occupants in an accident.

And for all his talk about jobs, this President thwarted the building of
the Keystone XL pipeline that would have created an estimated 20,000
jobs and who admitted that there were far fewer “shovel ready” jobs than
he thought. In the process, billions in so-called stimulus money were
wasted.

“I will only send our troops in harm’s way with a clear mission…” and so
he increased troop strength in Afghanistan, a totally stalemated war,
and announced the date the U.S. would leave! And was there a clear
mission in Libya where Obama choose to “lead from behind” NATO to affect
the overthrow of Gaddafi? As for the end of the war in Iraq, the
withdrawal of troops had been negotiated by the Bush administration
before Obama took office.

With the exception of the assassination of Osama bin Laden, the Taliban
are still active in Afghanistan and will reclaim that nation when NATO
forces leave. Al Qaeda has been diminished to an unknown extent but the
Islamic holy war against the West will continue.

Obama’s approach to Iran has been an embarrassment and a threat to
Israel, the Middle East and the West because he has shown no resolve
beyond useless UN “sanctions.”

And the 2012 Democratic Party convention had to restore a platform plank
acknowledging Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and to mention God.
Delegates booed that!

To suggest as he did that “climate change”, the code word for “global
warming” is not a hoax is to ignore the greatest hoax of the modern era,
one which his EPA uses to justify more and more and more regulation to
strangle manufacturing and business in America. Mankind has nothing to
do with the planet’s climate. The cycles of the Sun does that.

To suggest that taxing a few millionaires will cure the budget deficit
is a lie as America borrows more and pays more interest on an hourly
basis while the national debt has reached $16 trillion; more than the
value of all the goods and services this nation created and provided
this year. The U.S. is broke and living off its credit card. We must
restore fiscal sanity.

In one issue after another, in 2008 Obama skated by them with the oily
rhetoric of a snake oil salesman and in 2012 he did the same,
essentially offering the same failed policies, often using the same
words.

He promised a lot of change, along with a lot of hope. The only hope
left for most Americans is that the November 6th elections will remove
him from office and ensure that both the Senate and House empower
Congress to begin the work of real recovery from his failed policies,
programs, and promises.

He fooled a lot of voters in 2008, aided in no small degree by a
worshipful mainstream media. In 2012, Americans must not be fooled
again!

Alan Caruba's commentaries are posted daily at "Warning
Signs" and shared on dozens of news and opinion websites. His blog
recently passed more than1.7 million page views. If you love to read, visit his
monthly report on new books at Bookviews.
For information on his professional skills, Caruba Editorial Services is the place to go! You can find
me on both Facebook and Twitter as well.

About Me

J. D. Longstreet is a conservative Southern American (A native sandlapper and an adopted Tar Heel) with a deep passion for the history, heritage, and culture of the southern states of America. At the same time he is a deeply loyal American believing strongly in “America First”.